Jamie Arndt

Institution

University of Missouri, Columbia

Current Position

Professor

Highest Degree

Ph.D. in Psychology from University of Arizona, 1999

Much of what excites me about psychological research is the collaborative process of taking "big" questions about fundamental aspects of the human condition and subjecting them to empirical scrutiny through rigorous experimental methods. Following an existential tradition that draws heavily from such writers as Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, I am particularly fascinated by how our awareness of the transience of existence affects social behaviors, and how the pursuit of meaning and value in one’s life serves to protect the individual from deeply-rooted anxiety.

Utilizing terror management theory as a vehicle, this interest has led me to examine such domains of social psychological inquiry as aggression, unconscious and other cognitive processes, prejudice, stereotypes, creativity, political judgments, self-esteem processes, depression, consumer motivations, legal issues, parental and interpersonal attachment, nostalgia and temporal perceptions, physiological arousal and affect, self-awareness, and cultural identification and disidentification.

Currently, I am perhaps most focused on trying to understand the cognitive architecture that underlies the psychological defenses that people use to protect themselves from both the conscious and unconscious awareness of death, the implications of such an analysis for elucidating health relevant decisions and behaviors, and the dynamic interface between defensively oriented processes of human functioning with what are often considered to be fundamental motives for creativity, growth, and self-enrichment.

Arndt, J., Greenberg, J., Schimel, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (2002). To belong or not to belong, that is the question: Terror management and identification with gender and ethnicity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 26-43.